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I spent last week at a Disney-owned resort hotel with my family. I took my wife and two kids to the four main theme parks in Florida’s Disney World which included a dinner with none other than Cinderella and other real-life versions of cartoon princesses.

The whole week was as advertised: Magical!

However, getting access to news let alone high tech news was an impossible task. The TV in my room had 19 Disney themed channels, which was great for my daughters Isabella and Sofia, but not much for dear ole Dad. There is the Internet of course, but no wireless access. There wasn't a wireless network to be found. They did have a wired solution in the room but that connector did not fit my netbook. Disney was advertising an app that could help you best navigate through the Magic Kingdom, but it was only for the Apple iPhone. Steve Jobs is on Disney’s board by the way and I wonder if that’s the reason for poor wireless reception? I don't use an iPhone and I am not suggesting that only iPhone users get service at Disney either. No email for a week, which I managed to live without quite ok. But there weren’t any newspapers or magazines either; that I could see. While it was enjoyable at Disney World I sort of felt sequestered. There is no walking out to the corner store or hoping in your car. The whole place works (quite well) on a system of shuttle buses that transport you to the various parks and back.

So when Intel acquired McAfee I did not know about it. I heard about Intel’s usual buy yesterday. And, I was quite shocked! Intel does not make a lot of acquisitions unlike Oracle, HP or Cisco Systems. The company they should be buying is nVidia, but they never do. You see nVidia knows this to so Intel would have to overpay. Intel's culture is not to overpay on anything. Andy Grove's office for example was a cubicle the same size as any other employee. Yesterday I read many great articles on why Intel would want to buy a security vendor for close to $8 billion bucks. While it’s true they could have acquired Sophos, Bit Defender and Kaspersky for a lot less I think the main reason for buying McAfee is because they could. Intel has huge cash reserves. That’s great but it does not really help the company grow. With huge cash reserves you’re almost forced to buy something since the bank will give you little to no interest on your money. If they run it separately and keep smart people like Dave DeWalt and Alex Thurber this acquisition will be ok for the chip maker. If they tinker with it or worse ignore it like Intel did with Shiva it will be a colossal failure.

Now to be totally honest Disney is a busy place especially if you have children and I did not have a lot of down time for reading news.